Search engines have enabled users to quickly access information over the Internet. Specifically, a user can issue a query to a search engine and peruse ranked results returned by the search engine. For example, a user can provide a search engine with the query “Spider” and be provided with web pages relating to various arachnids, web pages relating to automobiles, web pages relating to films, web pages related to web crawlers, and other web pages. Search engines may also be used to return images to an issuer of a query, academic papers, videos, and other information.
As search engine technology has developed, search engines have been able to provide query suggestions to users. Query suggestions are alternate queries displayed to users of a search engine in the context of their original query. In a particular example, a user can provide a query to a search engine and the search engine returns ranked search results in response to the query. The search engine can also provide query suggestions that are in some way related to the originally provided query. The query suggestions are typically shown as hyperlinks that are selectable by the user. The user may select a search using a suggested query if they believe it will help them to navigate to their desired page or satisfy their informational need better than the original query. If the user selects a suggested query, the search engine performs a search using the suggested query and provides ranked search results that correspond to the suggested query.
There are several mechanisms used to provide query suggestions to users. One mechanism is to search for narrow query suggestions, which are queries that include the query issued by the user. For instance, if a user issues a query “spider”, query suggestions provided to the user may be “poisonous spider”, “identifying spiders”, “Spider car”, “spider solitaire”, “spider web”, and/or other queries that include the term “spider.” Conventionally, however, query suggestions are determined heuristically, and thus may not accurately reflect the needs of the user.